Issues with Privacy, Pornography and High School Videos
Your high school Spanish students have been extremely excited about a recent project in your class. Students have been writing scripts and acting out “commercials” in Spanish for imaginary products. You have recorded the commercials on a digital camcorder and uploaded the videos to YouTube. The response has been very positive to these videos, and several students have uploaded them to their personal MySpace pages and blogs to share them with friends.
However, one of your students, Olivia, just forwarded you a comment written in response to one of the videos in which she participated and asks for help translating. The comment is in Spanish and contains several sexual references and curse words. When Olivia clicks on the commenter's user name to find out more about the person, she sees videos with sexual content. What do you tell your students about the comment and what Olivia saw, and how do you advise them to respond?
Response to Individual Student
An individual response to the student, face to face, needs to occur first. Time and care should be taken to understand what she may have seen and explain it to her. The objective here is to strongly advise caution when surfing the net.
Advise the student to NOT respond to the commenter in any way, shape, or form!
Advise student that although highly unlikely, the provocative response may have been a result of a cultural difference. Still, the obscenities do point to a predator just looking for a chance to be abusive if he can get away with it.
Advise the student to delete the comments from the video post immediately
Advise the student to not click on offensive commentors' user names in an attempt to learn more about them. Many of these commenters are looking for attention or worse. By clicking on their user name, you can leave evidence that you viewed their profile, which may increase their interest in you.
Advise the student to close her MySpace account or Blog immediately.
Contact school authorities and Child Protective Services as well as parents who should contact police
Response to Class
An overall address needs to be made to the whole Spanish class,
Advise class that netiquette rules have been broken and one of them is receiving harassing, pornographic overtures because of one of the commercials she was in.
Advise them to proceed with caution in the future as the predator will probably be lurking. Therefore, you will change the venue for posting any further commercials to another site.
Review internet safety rules. Let the students call out the rules as instructor or another student writes them on the board.
The rules should include:
No pictures, especially flirty pictures (These tend to get re-posted.)
No party pictures, especially where alcohol might be served (Future colleges and employers will find your pictures.)
No names or addresses (Only share to friends in an e-mail.)
It may be wise to send a letter home to the parents (if one wasn't sent home already at the beginning of the unit) advising them of the class project, where it is posted and how to help their child surf carefully.
Include a sample or a link to tips about online harassment issues or websites that will help them have a productive conversation about safety on the internet.
Offer a computer usage workshop for all incoming freshman parents. Expose them to the sites their students are visiting, the possible images, videos they may be watching and how predators may reach them. Explore a Q & A with parents discussing how to talk to their students about these topics.
Regardless of grade level and subject, it is important to educate students on cyber safety before beginning any work with online social media tools. Below is a small assortment of websites and resources.
CyberSmart! offers a free, integrated K-12 Digital Literacy & Citizenship
curriculum that includes lesson plans, student activities, and materials
that can be sent home for parents. Some lessons that could be used to
address the concerns in the scenario above are HERE.
Mom's Homeroom presented by MSN offers a variety of resources to help prepare children to succeed in school.
In terms of our current topic, they have a video on Internet Safety Tips.
The video features George Perreault who serves as a director of Instructional Technology and Library Media
There is also a video titled Be Aware of Internet Dangers featuring David Snyder, Sergeant, Osceola County Sheriff's Office.
Wiredsafety.org claims to be the "world's largest online safety and help group."
On their site, they have a page titled, "Cyber Safety Through Information Literacy"
Expanding the Conversation
Additionally, it could be beneficial to expand the conversation beyond immediate safety and harassment concerns. These issues may not seem like a real threat for some students. To reach all students concerning the negative consequences of posting personal content to the Internet, the conversation can be expanded to include Internet privacy in general. This topic will help students to understand that vulgar content and sexual predators are not the only threats online. Students need to realize that everything they ever post to the Internet is permanent. Even if they delete the content, it is likely to stay alive and available due to other people downloading and re-posting and web crawlers that aggregate cached versions of websites, including all of the content. The video below discusses some of these issues concerning privacy.
Group C Workspace > Learning Activity 7-C-2
Issues with Privacy, Pornography and High School Videos
Your high school Spanish students have been extremely excited about a recent project in your class. Students have been writing scripts and acting out “commercials” in Spanish for imaginary products. You have recorded the commercials on a digital camcorder and uploaded the videos to YouTube. The response has been very positive to these videos, and several students have uploaded them to their personal MySpace pages and blogs to share them with friends.
However, one of your students, Olivia, just forwarded you a comment written in response to one of the videos in which she participated and asks for help translating. The comment is in Spanish and contains several sexual references and curse words. When Olivia clicks on the commenter's user name to find out more about the person, she sees videos with sexual content. What do you tell your students about the comment and what Olivia saw, and how do you advise them to respond?
Response to Individual Student
Response to Class
Review internet safety rules. Let the students call out the rules as instructor or another student writes them on the board.
The rules should include:
- No pictures, especially flirty pictures (These tend to get re-posted.)
- No party pictures, especially where alcohol might be served (Future colleges and employers will find your pictures.)
- No names or addresses (Only share to friends in an e-mail.)
- No dramatizing your life. Keep it to yourself.
Check it out! http://www.nsteens.org/Introduce and discuss the following topics with the class:
Introduce class to WHO@KTD.
Response to Parents
Future Considerations
Regardless of grade level and subject, it is important to educate students on cyber safety before beginning any work with online social media tools. Below is a small assortment of websites and resources.
curriculum that includes lesson plans, student activities, and materials
that can be sent home for parents. Some lessons that could be used to
address the concerns in the scenario above are HERE.
In terms of our current topic, they have a video on Internet Safety Tips.
The video features George Perreault who serves as a director of Instructional Technology and Library Media
There is also a video titled Be Aware of Internet Dangers featuring David Snyder, Sergeant, Osceola County Sheriff's Office.
The link on the left is to NCPC's main website. The link on the right is to the Internet Safety page with these main headings:
On their site, they have a page titled, "Cyber Safety Through Information Literacy"
Expanding the Conversation
Additionally, it could be beneficial to expand the conversation beyond immediate safety and harassment concerns. These issues may not seem like a real threat for some students. To reach all students concerning the negative consequences of posting personal content to the Internet, the conversation can be expanded to include Internet privacy in general. This topic will help students to understand that vulgar content and sexual predators are not the only threats online. Students need to realize that everything they ever post to the Internet is permanent. Even if they delete the content, it is likely to stay alive and available due to other people downloading and re-posting and web crawlers that aggregate cached versions of websites, including all of the content. The video below discusses some of these issues concerning privacy.